Africa in post-Brexit Europe

Some see the popular vote in the UK to withdraw from the European Union as a major blow that diminishes the future of Europe. But Brexit is a distraction from the core threat to Europe: policy driven by business strategy in response to a looming demographic crisis.

At a time when nationalist and separatist movements seem to constrain Europe, the EU is expanding its role as a global actor. Against the backdrop of xenophobia and an aging workforce, an emerging public-private alliance of EU policy and business leaders is creating its own client states in African countries where emigration is highest. We need to understand this process in order to allow more voices into the conversation.

EU and OECD data project long-term trends of a shrinking work force that will not sustain projected demand for labour. The EU faces low birth rates, longer expected lifespans, and a large post-war baby-boom generation now in its 50s and 60s that is approaching retirement. Statistics suggest the European population will grow moderately until around 2020, level off until 2030, and then become notably older through the year 2050. When the current generation of workers moves into retirement, their children will make up a significantly smaller workforce. Through the year 2050, member states will face an increasingly acute labour shortage as well as severe problems financing their pension and social welfare budgets.

Solutions from abroad

EU public policy and private sector leaders are seeing a combination of EU financial and economic crises, the devalued euro, security issues, terrorist attacks, the strength of populist and far-right nationalist movements, and even climate change as indicators that major post-industrial societies cannot isolate themselves from migration and globalisation. While the US attempts to close itself off from Latin America, and Japan resists population inflows from Southeast Asia, European leaders are looking outward to rejuvenate their societies’ social capital.

After WWII, and especially after 1989, Eastern Europe was a source of labour migration. However, this will not be sufficient to fill the EU’s needs. The main ‘sending’ countries of Europe’s pre-1989 ‘east’ — Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia — are experiencing declining fertility rates.

Turning to Africa

In view of the shifting demographic picture, the European Commission has begun, haltingly, to work towards an advantageous Europe-Africa relationship. EU strategy is based on pressing for three areas of reform: democratic transformation and institution-building, stronger civic institutions, and economic development prioritising small and medium-size enterprises, youth vocational training, and especially labour and manufacturing capacities optimised for outsourced work from the wealthier West and North.

From 2010 through 2015, a much larger public profile has been given to the rollout of the EU’s militarised naval blockade coordinated by its border agency Frontex, aimed at intercepting human trafficking on the Mediterranean. The strategy has added a pre-emptive military component to humanitarian intervention. This policy of militarising the Mediterranean is aimed to create Europe’s ‘pre-frontier’ on Africa’s north coast.

In May 2017, leading up to the fifth Europe-Africa summit in November in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the European Commission released its updated report on EU-Africa relations. The report includes a survey of leadership among members of government of European member states, European private sector business and thinktanks, and African Union counterparts. Survey results indicate that the trans-Mediterranean relationship will be driven by the interests of private investment. Moreover, the European private business sector indicated its intention to develop African enterprises and invest in offshore African subsidiaries over the next decade.

The survey indicates that European businesses prioritise establishing a Mediterranean free-trade regime, while African participants lament that they are not on an equal footing from which to reduce and eliminate trade and investment subsidies in the ‘partnership’ with Europe.

For the European business community, private investment is designed to yield returns on capital, training the young and urban workforce, and unifying standards of production in trans-Mediterranean business subsidiaries. Redirecting EU policy towards building offshore manufacturing subsidiaries is expected to regularise migrant labour flow from Africa to Europe.

Looking ahead, business interests in Europe after Brexit may bring about new and interesting shifts in EU-Africa relations.

First, Europe faces the likelihood of additional referenda and defeats. With its campaigns for support versus its quiet strategy to promote offshore client states, the EU is in an awkward position to answer populist criticism. The Commission and member states have shown themselves incapable or fearful of framing referenda on the EU with the problem that their own citizens are unable to sustain their standard of living. Instead of avoiding the topic, these referenda offer the opportunity to promote the economic and cultural enrichment that immigration can bring.

Second,Europe’s foreign policy is increasingly driven by business strategy. In the face of demographic trends, European businesses stand to benefit from building a partnership with Africa. Urban populations of North, West and sub-Saharan West Africa are growing where Europe’s are shrinking — and they are young where Europe’s are greying.

As this important shift unfolds, we should be vigilant about the rights of workers on both sides of the Mediterranean. The 2017 Europe-Africa or ‘EU-AU’ summit will be an important platform on which EU and business leadership create strategies for building a new hybrid fortress-immigrant Europe. We would do well to pay attention to this, and to future summits in the years ahead, as leading indicators of the shape of Europe to come.

Roland Hsu

Associate director of the Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the editor of “Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World”.